Years of artisanal mining along the Madre de Dios River and its tributaries have left their marks, both seen and unseen. Miners, swarming to the region in a modern-day goldrush,…
JAYAPURA, Indonesia, and NEW YORK — A palm oil firm that was among more than 100 companies targeted in a mass cancellation of permits for plantations by Indonesia’s environment ministry…
Tropical rainforests are more resilient than previously thought, a new study shows, with a high capacity for natural regeneration in areas that are only slightly degraded adjacent to patches of…
The “Black Summer” bushfires burned an area the size of the U.K. in Australia in 2019-20, forcing foresters to reconsider the meaning of forest resilience and how best to restore forests as climate change and drought intensify.
JAKARTA — The Indonesian government says it has no plans to reclassify oil palms as a forest crop rather than an agricultural one, following a controversial proposal made by the…
Forest degradation due to environmental causes (such as drought) and human causes (such as fragmentation) released three times as much carbon as deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon between 2010 and 2019, say researchers.
They may be labeled “degraded,” but forests that have been logged, or are otherwise no longer pristine due to human activity, can still provide immense value. According to new research…
Pesticides have been dropped from planes and even helicopters with the aim of evading IBAMA, the Brazilian environmental agency, for years as a method to clear remote and hard-to-reach areas…
Activists in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, say they fear logging will ramp up following the state government's decision to overturn a ban on exporting unprocessed timber. The ban was imposed by…
JAKARTA — Environmental activists have cautiously welcomed the Indonesian government’s move to revoke hundreds of permits for logging, plantations and mines, calling it an opportunity to conserve vast swaths of…
U.S. timber companies imported nearly 1,600 metric tons of teak from Myanmar last year, circumventing sanctions and channeling millions of dollars in revenue to the country’s junta, according to a…
With about 80% of its forests still untouched, Acre is one of Brazil’s least-deforested Amazonian states. Bordered by Peru on the west, it represents just 1.7% of Brazil’s huge land…
Update, 2/10/2022: The Indonesian government has now clarified that it will not seek to reclassify palm plantations as forests, read about it here. JAKARTA — Across large swaths of Indonesia, forests…
JAKARTA — A “social forestry” program administered by the Indonesian government to grant land rights to communities has not been effective in preventing deforestation, and in some cases has even…
Between rising deforestation in the Amazon, new financial and political commitments to reduce deforestation, and growing interest in “nature-based solutions” like conservation and reforestation, 2021 may prove to be a…
To date, 2021 has proved to be one of the most consequential years for Indigenous rights and participation in global climate and conservation efforts. As biodiversity loss mounted and urgency…
Over the past decade, the European Union entered into collaborative agreements with tropical timber-producing countries to fight forest crime and verify the legality of wood imported into the EU. Within…
For the Amazon, 2021 was yet another year under the pandemic where the onslaught against nature never seemed to end. Deforestation continues, surging at year’s end Deforestation continued in the…
2021 was a year where tropical forests featured more prominently in global headlines than normal thanks to rising recognition of the role they play in addressing climate change and biodiversity…
Home to more rainforest than any country but Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia is one of the world's most significant nations from an environmental and biodiversity perspective.…
RIO BRANCO, Brazil — The intensification of forest fires in the Brazilian Amazon is increasingly impacting the health of local populations, with a marked effect on the region’s Indigenous peoples.…
Myanmar’s rainforests, home to the endangered Malayan tapir (Tapirus indicus), critically endangered Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica) and endangered lar gibbon (Hylobates lar), are some of the most biodiverse in the…
At the COP26 climate summit last month, when Brazilian Environment Minister Joaquim Leite announced the country would update its climate goals to include zero illegal deforestation by 2028 (replacing the…
A group of supermarket chains that includes Sainsbury’s in the U.K. and Lidl in the Netherlands said this week that they will either reduce or outright halt sales of Brazilian…
This is the wrap-up article for our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four. In the first half of December, Mongabay…
Yasuní National Park in Ecuador’s northern Amazon rainforest has long been famed for being one of the most biodiverse places on Earth, home to thousands of species of plants, birds,…
Severe droughts over the past two decades have affected the resilience of the Amazon Rainforest, a new study shows, with stretches of affected forest taking between one and three years…
Low German Old Colony Mennonites, who have been settling across Latin America for the past 100 years, have cleared 495 hectares (1,223 acres) of rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon so…
At least 12,500 tonnes of wood came from rainforest species considered threatened by the Brazilian Forestry Service (SFB).
This is the fourth article in our four-part series “The Congo Basin peatlands.” Read Part One, Part Two and Part Three. The muddy cores that Ian Lawson and his colleagues…
